Doxmael

The territories assigned to the ninety-one Parts are worth examining as a group, because their pattern says something about where the list came from.

They are, overwhelmingly, the geography of the classical authors. Ptolemy, Pliny, Strabo and Herodotus supply almost every identifiable name: Hyrcania, Sogdiana, Bactria, Oxiana, Colchis, Cappadocia, Paphlagonia, the Garamantes, the Nasamones, Coele-Syria, Commagene, Serica. These are not the names an Elizabethan would use for the world of 1584. They are the names in the books an Elizabethan scholar would have on his shelves, and Dee had one of the largest private libraries in England.

The distribution follows from that. The eastern Mediterranean, Anatolia and the Near East are divided very finely. North Africa is divided finely. Central Asia is unexpectedly well represented, tracking the route of Alexander's campaigns as the classical geographers describe them. Western Europe is treated broadly, with single Parts for Spain, Britain and Germany. India gets one Part. The Americas get none at all, ninety years after Columbus.

Several territories appear twice: Assyria, Bactria, Chaldea, Media and Idumea each occur under two entries in separate Aethyrs. The duplication is in Dee's own compilation and cannot be blamed on copyists.

And roughly a quarter of the names, Gosmam, Parsadal, Phalagon, Trenam, Onigap, Coxlant, Fiacim, Vinsan, Tolpam, Gorsin, Oacidi, Asnan, Adunia and others, match no known place at all. These have been read as regions unknown to Europe, as classical names garbled in transmission by ear, and as invention. The manuscripts do not decide it, and the honest description is that the list mixes a scholar's classical geography with a residue that nobody has been able to account for.

The Enochian literature is unusually large and unusually uneven, and a few habits make it navigable.

Go to the manuscripts where you can. Dee's diaries and Sloane 3191 survive and have been published in transcription and facsimile. They are not difficult to consult. A very high proportion of confident statements in secondary sources cannot be traced back to them.

Date every claim. Ask whether a given detail is from the 1580s, the 1880s, from Crowley, or from the last few decades. The four layers are routinely presented as one. An attribution that entered practice through MacGregor Mathers is not thereby wrong, but it is not evidence about what Dee received.

Treat commercial sources with particular care. There is a large market in Enochian material, and confident specificity sells better than uncertainty. Claims that a given name governs a particular faculty, or corresponds to a particular tarot trump, or has a documented traditional character, are usually downstream of a single nineteenth-century or twentieth-century decision that has since been copied without attribution.

Distinguish the kinds of uncertainty. Some questions are genuinely contested and should be reported as such: Kelley's honesty is the standing example. Some are simply unsourced and can be checked. Some are unknowable, such as what precisely Kelley experienced when he looked into the crystal, and the right response there is to describe the range of views rather than to pick one.

Do not mistake internal coherence for provenance. The system is impressively coherent, and the Tablet of Union pattern in ZAX is a real structural fact. Coherence tells you the material was constructed to a design. It does not tell you by whom.