The Eighth Call begins at midday and builds a scene of colored pillars, elders, a dragon, and a falling house. Its later Earth of Air placement is a separate editorial layer.
- Number
- Eighth of the numbered Calls
- 1912 text
- The Equinox I:8, pp. 115–116
- 1912 assignment
- Earth of Air
A passage that crosses the page turn
The Angelical text of the Eighth appears at the foot of printed page 115, while its English rendering begins on page 116. That physical split matters when checking a scan: a reader who stops at the first heading can miss the English altogether. The rendering opens at midday and describes a heaven supported by twenty-six hyacinth-colored pillars. Elders, a stooping dragon, a widow’s harvest, a threatened house, and divided crowns follow in rapid succession.
Those elements give the Call a drama of endurance and collapse. The English voice asks who will remain alive and then calls the addressed powers forth. Its final contrast of terror on earth and comfort for the prepared is part of the printed religious rhetoric, not evidence for a predictable effect. The imagery and the page break together distinguish the Eighth from its neighboring Calls.
Earth of Air in the 1912 table
Beneath the English rendering, the 1912 Equinox article assigns the Eighth to the Earth angle of the Air tablet. It follows the Seventh’s Water of Air and precedes the Ninth’s Fire of Air. The same article gave Air of Air to the Third Call. Together these four positions fill the Air tablet in the magazine’s four-by-four layout, even though they are scattered across the earlier and later numbered Calls.
The word “Earth” here names the subordinate angle, not the whole tablet. Searching for “Eighth Call Earth” can therefore produce an oversimplified result that appears to contradict a chart assigning the Air tablet. Both terms belong in the full relation, Earth of Air. The pillar and harvest images may feel earthy to a modern interpreter, but the historical basis for this precise combination is the bracketed 1912 attribution, not a guess from the imagery.
Tracing the record backward
The British Library catalogue identifies Sloane MS 3191 as the autograph home of Dee’s forty-eight Angelical Keys and places the group at folios 1r–13r. It gives the reception span of 13 April to 13 July 1584, but not a public individual folio or reception day for this Eighth Call. The 1912 printed page span is therefore the precise locator used here. Checking an exact Angelical spelling would require more than the broad catalogue summary.
The Wellcome copy of Casaubon’s 1659 edition preserves a seventeenth-century print route into Dee’s recorded conferences. It is valuable for the history of how the sessions were presented, but it is not identical to the separate Keys manuscript or the Equinox rendering. A reader can compare those historical layers without accepting the later Earth of Air system as Dee’s own annotation. That separation keeps the entry useful both to someone exploring the imagery and to someone tracing how the Call was reclassified.
Sources and witness notes
- British Library, Sloane MS 3191 catalogue ↗Autograph volume, forty-eight Keys at folios 1r–13r, dated 13 April–13 July 1584.
- The Equinox, volume I, number 8 (1912), The Forty-Eight Calls or Keys ↗Original-issue article on printed pages 99–127; the Calls begin on page 103 and the Aethyr Call ends on page 127. Its English renderings and later elemental assignments supply the summary table.
- 100th Monkey Press, The Equinox I:8 original-issue scan and bibliography ↗Bibliographic record links a scan of the original September 1912 issue. Calls 1–18 span printed pages 103–124; the Aethyr Call spans 125–127. These printed numbers differ from PDF page indexes.
- Wellcome Collection, digitized 1659 True & Faithful Relation ↗Public-domain early print of Casaubon’s edition of Dee’s conferences; contextual diary witness, not Dee’s separate autograph Keys book.
- Christopher L. Whitby, John Dee’s Actions with Spirits, vol. 1 ↗Scholarly analysis of the manuscript books, Calls, thirty Aethyrs, and ninety-one earthly parts.