Tabitom

The thirty Aethyrs, also written Aires, are the vertical dimension of the Parts of the Earth. Where the ninety-one Parts distribute the surface of the world, the thirty Aethyrs are described as surrounding the earth in layers, one within another, so that a Part carries a position in a hierarchy as well as a place on a map.

Their names were given at the very end of the 1584 work, on 13 July, together with the last portion of the Call of the Aethyrs. They run LIL, ARN, ZOM, PAZ, LIT, MAZ, DEO, ZID, ZIP, ZAX, ICH, LOE, ZIM, UTA, OXO, LEA, TAN, ZEN, POP, KHR, ASP, LIN, TOR, NIA, UTI, DES, ZAA, BAG, RII, TEX. LIL is the first and outermost; TEX is the thirtieth and nearest to earth.

Each Aethyr holds three Parts, with a single exception: TEX holds four. That is the reason the total is ninety-one and not ninety. The received material gives no explanation for the anomaly, and no later account has produced one that rests on anything in the manuscripts.

A single Call serves all thirty. It is spoken with the name of the Aethyr inserted at the appropriate point, so that thirty invocations are produced from one text. This economy is characteristic of the system and is one of the features that has struck readers as either elegant design or efficient improvisation, depending on their view of its origin.

Two points about ordering are worth fixing. First, the Parts within an Aethyr are grouped, not ranked; nothing in the table makes one govern the others. Second, Dee's presentation runs from the first Aethyr inward. The now-standard practice of working from the thirtieth toward the first is Crowley's, and follows from a model of ascent that Dee's material does not propose.

A useful exercise for anyone approaching this material is to ask, of each detail, which century it comes from.

From Dee and Kelley, 1583 to 1587: the Enochian alphabet and language; the Calls or Keys with their translations; the Great Table and the four Watchtowers; the Tablet of Union names; the thirty Aethyrs and their names; the ninety-one Parts with their regions, their Aethyrs, their twelve Zodiacal Kings, the tribes of Israel those Kings are associated with, and the counts of ministers; the Heptarchic material with its seven kings and princes; the Sigillum Dei Aemeth. This is a large body of primary material and it survives in manuscripts, principally Sloane 3191 and the diaries, in the British Library.

From the Golden Dawn, 1880s onward: the elemental and tarot correspondences; the pyramid and Enochian chess apparatus; the Kerubic and Servient labels; the treatment of the ninety-one names as governing spirits to be invoked individually; the placement of the whole system inside a grade structure; and the working practice that almost every subsequent book assumes.

From Crowley, 1900 onward: the mapping of the Aethyrs onto the sephiroth in triads; the Abyss and Choronzon at ZAX; the reversed working order; and the Thelemic reading of the whole.

From the later twentieth century: the zodiacal signs now attached to the twelve Kings, which are modern reconstructions; a substantial body of independent vision work; and, from the 1980s, a scholarly and practical movement back toward the manuscripts themselves.

None of these layers is illegitimate as practice. The problem is only that they are routinely presented undifferentiated, so that a nineteenth-century attribution and a sixteenth-century record appear in the same sentence with the same authority.