The Fifteenth Call addresses a governor of the first flame. The English text connects wings, dryness, righteousness, and honor before the 1912 editor assigns it Fire of Earth.
- Number
- Fifteenth of the numbered Calls
- 1912 text
- The Equinox I:8, pp. 121–122
- 1912 assignment
- Fire of Earth
The governor and the first flame
In the printed English rendering, the addressee governs a first flame and bears 6,739 beneath its wings. The image of wings gives way to work on the earth through dryness, followed by knowledge of a great name associated with righteousness and a seal associated with honor. The passage is short, but it moves from rank to number to environmental action and then to named qualities. It is not interchangeable with the later second and third flame Calls.
A conventional request to appear and disclose hidden matters concludes the English paragraph. On this page that appeal is described as textual rhetoric, not turned into a practical sequence or a guarantee. The large number is printed as part of the image; this article does not treat it as a validated angel count or an instruction to repeat anything that many times. The pairing of dryness with an apparently fertile Earth-tablet grouping also shows why a one-word elemental gloss is too thin.
The last supplementary angle of Earth
The Equinox bracket assigns the Fifteenth to Fire of Earth. Its position follows the Thirteenth’s Air of Earth and the Fourteenth’s Water of Earth. Together with the Fifth’s Earth of Earth, these four make the complete Earth-tablet row in the printed four-by-four scheme. The Fifteenth closes that row before the sequence turns to the Fire tablet at the Sixteenth. The order explains the classification more reliably than a guess based on the noun “flame.”
The later editor also gives the Call a rank title tied to earth. That added ceremonial caption is adjacent to, but separate from, the English rendering. A modern page that silently merges the two can make a twentieth-century system look like a literal translation of Dee’s Angelical words. Here the rendering supplies the first-flame, dryness, righteousness, and honor motifs; the bracket supplies the Fire of Earth place. Both are features of the 1912 witness.
The Fifteenth continues onto page 122
The Angelical Fifteenth starts at the bottom of printed page 121 in the original issue. Its English rendering and Fire of Earth bracket are on page 122. A search result on page 121 alone would therefore find the heading but not the content most English readers seek. The printed span, rather than an unlabelled PDF page number, tells a reader which two leaves to inspect for both forms and the later assignment.
Dee’s autograph Keys belong to Sloane MS 3191 according to the British Library catalogue; it gives folios 1r–13r and an April–July 1584 reception span for the corpus. The record does not individualize the Fifteenth by folio or day in its summary. This entry accordingly uses the 1912 issue for its close reading and clearly labels the older manuscript as the source for the series’ physical existence. It does not infer manuscript punctuation from the printed page.
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.
- 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.