These materials sit near each other in Dee’s manuscript but have different structures and dates. Later books often bind them into one “Enochian” system.
- Heptarchia
- Seven-planet notes, MS 3191 ff. 32r–51r
- Angelical Keys
- MS 3191 ff. 1r–13r
- Liber Scientiae
- MS 3191, two further folio ranges
The bound volume gives the first answer
The British Library describes Sloane MS 3191 as the only surviving book of ceremonial magic entirely in Dee’s hand. It locates the forty-eight Angelical Keys at folios 1r–13r. A Book of Earthly Knowledge follows at folios 14r–31r and resumes at 52r–80v. Between those ranges, at folios 32r–51r, Dee placed De heptarchia mystica, a seven-chapter work on the mystical rule of the seven planets. Sharing one physical volume does not make the sections identical texts.
The catalogue dates the Keys to their reception in Kraków in 1584 and the first Liber Scientiae section to collection on 2 May 1585. It links portions of the Heptarchia to conferences beginning in November 1582, preserved in Sloane MS 3188. Christopher Whitby’s dissertation follows those early actions in detail. Thus a reader can describe the Heptarchia as an earlier, planetary strand in the records rather than a chapter invented by the later Watchtower tradition.
Seven planets and elemental tablets answer different questions
The Heptarchia organizes named offices and chapters around seven planets. The Angelical Keys form a corpus of texts, while the Liber Scientiae collects earthly divisions and governors. The four colored elemental Watchtowers familiar to many readers are a further interpretive arrangement developed in later occult teaching. These categories can be studied together because later practitioners related them, but their original documents should first be described separately.
A “seven planetary kings of the Watchtowers” chart can combine a name from one folio, a role defined in another section, and an elemental or directional assignment introduced by a later editor. The same name can therefore appear in a new diagram without making that diagram a facsimile of the older text.
Trace a statement to its layer
Dee’s Heptarchia occupies folios 32r–51r of Sloane MS 3191. The earlier dated conferences survive in Sloane MS 3188, while the Keys and Liber Scientiae have their own folio ranges within MS 3191. Casaubon’s 1659 Relation is a later edited print, and Golden Dawn or Crowley diagrams represent later reception. The Harry Ransom Center’s Golden Dawn materials show that readers were still arranging Enochian tables in new instructional forms centuries after Dee.
This historical map explains why two apparently conflicting websites can both contain genuine Dee vocabulary while assigning it differently. One may follow a manuscript chapter and another a nineteenth-century order paper. Their distinct shelfmarks, folios, and editions reveal the relationship more clearly than the single label “Enochian magic.”
References
- British Library, Sloane MS 3191 (Keys, Liber Scientiae, Heptarchia) ↗
- British Library, Sloane MS 3188 (early conferences) ↗
- Christopher L. Whitby, John Dee’s Actions with Spirits (University of Birmingham, 1982) ↗
- Folger Shakespeare Library, A True & Faithful Relation (1659) ↗
- Harry Ransom Center, Aleister Crowley papers finding aid ↗