The Fourteenth Call continues the later Earth-tablet group. Its brief English rendering joins an address to children of fury with seats, age, and a promise of severe justice.
- Number
- Fourteenth of the numbered Calls
- 1912 text
- The Equinox I:8, p. 121
- 1912 assignment
- Water of Earth
Twenty-four seats and the weight of age
The English Fourteenth Key addresses sons of fury and daughters of a just figure. They sit on twenty-four seats and trouble earthly creatures with age; a further 1,636 are described beneath them. The passage then turns to a divine voice and a promise associated with fury and extreme justice. That combination of familial titles, ranked seats, aging, and judgment is specific enough to identify the text without repeating it as a liturgy.
The imperative ending asks the addressed figures to reveal themselves and the mysteries of their creation. These are claims and requests made by the historical English rendering, not claims this reference makes about a reader’s outcome. In particular, the numerical details are part of the 1912 witness. They are not a measure of lifespan, a list of observable beings, or directions for a working. Reading the number alongside its printed sentence preserves context.
Water of Earth is the later slot
A bracket directly below the English text places this Call in the Water angle of the Earth tablet. The Thirteenth has Air of Earth, the Fifteenth has Fire of Earth, and the Fifth supplies Earth of Earth in the same 1912 scheme. Thus the Fourteenth is the middle of three later subangle Calls that complete the Earth grouping. The two-part label matters: “Water” names the subangle, while “Earth” names the parent tablet.
Nothing in the short English paragraph requires a reader to derive Water from the age or fury imagery. The evidence for the precise relation is the printed apparatus, not an intuitive element assigned to a word. The issue also adds a ceremonial rank title beneath the angle line. That is another feature of the later arrangement, distinct from the Call’s English rendering. A source-led index can record these categories without attributing the whole layout to Dee’s 1584 book.
One printed page, two historical layers
The original-issue scan puts the Fourteenth’s Angelical paragraph, English rendering, and Water of Earth bracket together on printed page 121. The preceding Thirteenth closes on page 120; the Fifteenth begins at the foot of 121. Those page boundaries make the number and its attribution independently checkable. A reconstructed issue or searchable transcript may use a different PDF page index, so the locator here is the number printed on the original page.
The British Library catalogue identifies Dee’s earlier forty-eight Angelical Keys in Sloane MS 3191, folios 1r–13r, dated across April to July 1584. It does not provide a public individual folio or date for the Fourteenth. The manuscript record establishes the older numbered corpus, while The Equinox supports this entry’s concrete image and elemental-label claims. Exact sixteenth-century spellings would require manuscript inspection or a collation beyond the catalogue.
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.