The Thirty Aethyrs

The Aethyrs are the last major part of the Enochian material to be received, and they arrive as a complete administrative structure rather than as a description of a place.

Each of the thirty is named by a word of three letters, LIL first and remotest and TEX thirtieth and nearest to the world. Attached to them are ninety one governors, distributed three to each Aethyr with an extra in the first, and each governor is assigned a territory on the earth. The tables setting those assignments out, with the number of ministers under each governor and the region each is said to have charge of, occupy a manuscript of their own, so the system maps a hierarchy of spirits onto a geography of the known world.

Entry is by recitation. A single invocation, delivered in the Enochian language with an English rendering, is used for every Aethyr, with the three letter name of the one being sought substituted at the appropriate point. There is no ascent through the physical world and no correspondence to a sky; the ordering is one of remoteness from ordinary consciousness.

The material came through Edward Kelley, who reported what he saw in a shewstone while John Dee, a mathematician and adviser to the English court, sat beside him writing it down and asking questions. Dee's diaries record the sessions in detail, including his own doubts and the difficulties between the two men, and it is that record, published in the seventeenth century and preserved in manuscript, that later practitioners have worked from.

For three centuries the Aethyrs were a table in a manuscript. What made them a working system was Aleister Crowley's decision to go through all thirty in sequence.

He had scried some of the lower ones in Mexico in 1900. In 1909 he took the remainder in North Africa, travelling in the desert with the poet Victor Neuburg, working from the thirtieth upward toward the first, reciting the call and dictating what he saw and heard while Neuburg wrote. The record was published as The Vision and the Voice and is the fullest such document in modern Western esotericism, whatever one concludes about its status.

The working's centre is the tenth Aethyr, ZAX, which he identified with the Abyss of the kabbalistic tree and where he described an encounter with a being called Choronzon, conducted with Neuburg inside a protective circle and the encounter taking place in a triangle drawn in the sand. The account of that operation is the passage most often reproduced.

Out of it Crowley built a map of initiation. The upper Aethyrs are read as corresponding to the highest grades of his system, the crossing of the Abyss is placed at ZAX, and the sequence becomes a description of stages a practitioner is expected to pass through rather than a survey of places.

That is worth naming precisely. The Aethyrs as a scheme are Elizabethan; their use as a ladder of attainment is Crowley's, and the two should not be read back into one another.