The Fifth Call’s English imagery is unusually gentle for a series often advertised as forceful invocation: olives, watering vessels, gladness, and comfort fill the 1912 rendering.
- Number
- Fifth of the numbered Calls
- 1912 text
- The Equinox I:8, pp. 111–112
- 1912 assignment
- Earth tablet; Earth of Earth
An image sequence built around nourishment
The 1912 English version begins with mighty sounds entering a third angle. They become like olives on the Olive Mount, look upon earth with gladness, and dwell in heavenly brightness as comforters. The speaker then describes pillars of gladness and vessels that water the earth and its creatures. These are linked images rather than a simple one-word label for the element Earth: growth, irrigation, light, and kinship all carry the passage.
The edition goes on to describe lamps that burn continually and numbers related to the beginnings, endings, and contents of time. Its conclusion asks the addressed beings to visit in peace and comfort. The invitation is part of a historical religious text. Describing its rhetoric does not assert that its requests work, and the page does not turn the words into a personalized ritual or instruction sequence.
Where the Earth attribution appears
After the English paragraph, the 1912 Equinox article assigns the Fifth to the whole Earth tablet and the Earth of Earth angle. On the same printed opening, this follows the Fourth Call’s Water attribution and precedes a ceremonial section for the Fire grade. The magazine’s alternating layout helps explain why a copied web page can accidentally blend a Call with the adjacent grade directions. The heading “Fifth Key” bounds the Call; the bracketed attribution is commentary on its use.
The Olive Mount can tempt a simple symbolic claim that the text “must” belong to Earth in every historical form. The evidence is narrower and clearer: the 1912 editor explicitly associates it with the Earth tablet. Dee’s manuscript establishes an earlier numbered corpus, while the later elemental layout establishes a twentieth-century way of arranging it. The Earth assignment is therefore a feature of the 1912 table rather than a timeless property of the Call.
Finding the Fifth in the archive
The British Library catalogue gives the whole Keys section of Sloane MS 3191 as folios 1r–13r and dates reception across April to July 1584 in Kraków. It does not state an individual folio for the Fifth Call in its public description. Giving a precise autograph folio for this entry from that broad range would invent precision. The printed Fifth Key is easy to locate instead: its Angelical text begins on printed page 111 and its English rendering follows on page 112 of The Equinox, volume I, number 8.
Wellcome marks its copy of Casaubon’s 1659 diary edition as public domain and offers it online. The diary and Dee’s separate autograph Keys are related witnesses with different editorial histories. Whitby’s manuscript study describes the larger sequence of eighteen fixed forms plus an Aethyr formula. Taken together, these references let a reader move from this particular printed Call to the period of its reception without assuming Casaubon, Dee’s fair copy, and the 1912 Equinox article are one interchangeable text.
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.