Why Great Table and Watchtower Diagrams Differ

A finished grid combines several decisions

The Great Table is a composite field of four lettered quadrants joined by a central cross. Its visual regularity can suggest that a single perfect chart descended unchanged through time. The documents show a less tidy process. The 1584 conference record describes delivery and correction; Sloane MS 3191 preserves Dee’s later orderly working material; Casaubon turns parts of the record into a printed book in 1659; and The Equinox presents directional Watch-Tower plates in 1912. Each object fixes the table for a different purpose and audience.

Those stages affect more than decoration. A quadrant can move while the names running through it remain attached to the same letter field. A copied square can retain two alternatives. A printer must choose how to set characters that do not fit ordinary type. A ceremonial editor can then divide, color, and label the resulting field as an elemental tablet. The structure may remain recognizably related even when a single square, a meridian name, or the direction assigned to a quadrant changes.

The central names reveal how a chart was edited

The three names running across the central line of a quadrant offer a useful test because they are long enough to expose a changed square but short enough to compare. In the quadrant later taught as Water or West, the sequence is commonly printed as MPH, ARSL, GAIOL. Burns and Moore’s collation reports that Sloane MS 3191 preserves both OL and CH at the end of the third name, producing the alternatives GAIOL and GAICH. The second reading continues letters associated with the governor VIROCHI; the first is the reading selected by the later printed teaching text.

This is not a dispute that can be settled by calling one modern chart cleaner. The manuscript’s doubled ending is evidence of an unresolved or layered decision. The Equinox I:7 supplies a dated answer for its own system: its prose prints MPH, ARSL, GAIOL while its plate teaches a West or Water tablet with later ceremonial divisions. A modern rectified chart may instead choose GAICH under an explicit rule that governor names control conflicting table letters. That rule is an editorial argument, not a photograph of an uncontested original.

Worked comparison: one changed Great Table cell across manuscript, print, and modern chart

Focus on the penultimate position of the third central Water name. In the Sloane evidence summarized by Burns and Moore, that position carries an O/C alternative; the neighboring final position carries L/H. Read one pair and the name ends OL, giving GAIOL. Read the other and it ends CH, giving GAICH. Because the two adjacent squares change together, isolating the penultimate O/C square is a close-reading device rather than a claim that the final L/H is irrelevant.

The 1912 print makes its choice visible in ordinary type. Under “Linea Spiritus Sancti” it lists the three names as MPH, ARSL, GAIOL. A reader of that edition therefore encounters O in the penultimate position and L at the end. The printed line removes the manuscript’s visual hesitation: it presents one pronounceable sequence, then builds senior names and other ceremonial attributions around the tablet. The apparent certainty belongs to the edition’s presentation.

A modern rectified chart can make the opposite choice and print GAICH. Burns and Moore explain that choice by following VIROCHI through the crossing: C and H preserve the governor’s sequence, so their reconstruction lets the governor govern the conflicting squares. This is an inference from a stated structural rule. The comparison does not prove that every scribe intended GAICH, nor does the later GAIOL print erase the manuscript alternative. It shows exactly how one changed cell records three editorial states: manuscript ambiguity, a printed selection, and a modern reconstruction.

One changed letter alters every name crossing its square

The central names are used as structural labels and as sources for other names in later systems. Choosing O rather than C therefore propagates beyond one box. It changes the visible god-name, affects any extraction crossing that point, and identifies which editorial family a chart follows. Color does something similar at another level: it tells the viewer how a later order classified the quadrant, even though pigment cannot resolve a sixteenth-century letter.

This close case explains why two competent diagrams can disagree. One may transcribe a marked manuscript square, another may reproduce The Equinox, and a third may apply a governor-based correction. Their agreement on the four-part form does not make their letters interchangeable. A useful diagram should be understood as a dated construction with a recoverable decision path. The historical question is what that version preserves and adds, rather than which polished image looks most authoritative.

References

1. British Library, Sloane MS 3191 (Keys, Liber Scientiae, Heptarchia) ↗
2. Teresa Burns and J. Alan Moore, “John Dee and Edward Kelley’s Great Table, Part II” ↗
3. Folger Shakespeare Library, A True & Faithful Relation (1659) ↗
4. Cornell University Library, digitized 1659 True & Faithful Relation ↗
5. The Equinox I:7 (1912), original issue scan ↗