ZOM

The Aethyrs occupy an unusual place within the wider Enochian system Dee and Kelley produced: unlike the elaborate tables, calls and angelic hierarchies recorded elsewhere in Dee's manuscripts, the thirty Aethyrs as Dee first received them are little more than a bare list of names and governing angels, compiled into the treatise later known as Liber Scientiae and dated in Dee's own record to 2 May 1585, a full year after the main run of scrying sessions had concluded in July 1584. That gap between the original sessions and the treatise's compilation is itself a reminder that the Enochian corpus was assembled and organised over time rather than delivered as a single finished system.

It was this thin skeleton, a name, ZOM, and its governing Parts of the Earth, that the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn took up from 1888 and began to furnish with the elaborate visionary and initiatory content later systems associate with the Aethyrs, work carried much further by Aleister Crowley's own scrying of all thirty Aethyrs in 1900 and 1909 and published as The Vision and the Voice. Everything beyond Dee's original bare record, the vivid landscapes, guardian figures and initiatory ordeals popularly associated with an Aethyr like ZOM today, belongs to that later three-century remove from Dee's own sixteenth-century sessions rather than to the Elizabethan record itself.

Any statement about the third 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 ZOM, its place as the third 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.

Counting the thirty

The Aethyrs are numbered with LIL as the first and TEX as the thirtieth, and the convention is that the first is the most remote and the thirtieth the nearest. Crowley accordingly worked them in reverse, beginning at the thirtieth and ascending, which is why the numbering in his record runs down the page as the sequence goes up. A reader meeting a list that starts at TEX is looking at working order, not at a different numbering.

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.