Ceremonial & Esoteric Magic

This section covers the practical, operative side of Western esotericism: the planetary spirits, intelligences and magic squares of Renaissance magic, the four elementals, and the thirty Aethyrs and ninety-one governors of the Enochian system received by John Dee and Edward Kelley in the 1580s.

Where much of the atlas is concerned with belief and cosmology, this material is concerned with technique, the timing, tools and procedures by which practitioners sought to act on the world or on themselves through contact with the beings and forces the cosmology described.

The backbone of the tradition is the Renaissance synthesis, above all Cornelius Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy (1533), which drew together Neoplatonic, Hermetic and Kabbalistic sources and gave each planet its square, seal, spirit and intelligence. The Enochian material stands somewhat apart, a self-contained angelic system recorded in Dee and Kelley's scrying diaries and later reworked by the Golden Dawn and by Aleister Crowley.

The entries describe these systems as historical and textual objects (who set them down, in which books, and how they were used), without claiming that the operations succeed.