Nociabi

Nociabi is one of the ninety-one Governors, the Parts of the Earth, set down in John Dee's Liber Scientiae Auxilii et Victoriae Terrestris, the register he compiled from the angelic sessions worked with Edward Kelley in 1584 and dated 2 May 1585.

Aethyr and King

In that tabulation Nociabi is placed within the fifteenth Aethyr, OXO, counting from LIL; each Aethyr holds three Governors. Nociabi is assigned to the Zodiacal King who rules Sagittarius, one of the twelve Kings among whom the ninety-one Parts are shared, and in Dee's manuscript it is joined besides to a count of ministers and a region of the earth.

Beyond these attributions, a name, an Aethyr, a governing King, a number of ministers and a place on the map, the early sources say little of Nociabi as an individual. The elaborate character given to the Governors in modern practice belongs to the Golden Dawn's Enochian system (from 1888) and its Thelemic development, layers added three centuries after Dee, and is treated here as tradition, studied historically, its entities not reified.

In the Register

Nociabi stands second among the three Parts allotted to OXO. Its name runs to seven letters, the length all but two of the ninety-one names share. Like every Governor's, the name is also a figure: Dee's papers trace each of the ninety-one names letter by letter across the lettered squares of the Great Table, so that every Part of the Earth has a sigil as well as a name. The register attaches besides a count of ministering angels to each entry, a number that differs Part by Part, and it is by these tallies, not by any narrative, that the original material distinguishes one Governor from the next.

Liber Scientiae distributes the ninety-one Parts of the Earth across the thirty Aethyrs three at a time, until the last Aethyr, which takes four. OXO, the fifteenth in the order that runs from LIL, the most remote, down to TEX, nearest the earth, holds Nociabi in the second place together with Tahamdo and Tastoxo. The three were received and tabulated together, and later practice treats them together, as the company through which their Aethyr is approached.

Dee's table also sets each Part under one of twelve Zodiacal Kings, and ties each King to a tribe of Israel. The zodiac sign recorded for Nociabi in this atlas, Sagittarius, rests on a further step Dee himself never took: the manuscripts direct that signs be derived from the tribes and record no derivation, so every sign now in circulation is a later reconstruction, and the competing reconstructions disagree.

The Aethyrs, unlike the Governors, acquired a modern literature. The Golden Dawn folded Dee's material into its curriculum from 1888, and Aleister Crowley scried all thirty Aethyrs, two in Mexico in 1900 and the remaining twenty-eight in the Algerian desert in 1909, publishing the record as The Vision and the Voice. In that record it is each Aethyr itself that fills the vision; the Governors of OXO play no speaking part, and the characters later occultists give them are tradition built on top of a bare table, not anything received in the sessions.

Modern entry into an Aethyr follows Crowley's method: the nineteenth Enochian Call, one fixed text with only the Aethyr's name changed, serves all thirty, so a practitioner working OXO recites the Call with that name and customarily greets its Governors, Nociabi among them, on the way in. What any of them is beyond a name in a register, the sources do not say.