The Fourth Call opens in the south in the 1912 English rendering, yet its printed ceremonial assignment is Water. That apparent mismatch is a useful reason to read the text and the later apparatus separately.
- Number
- Fourth of the numbered Calls
- 1912 text
- The Equinox I:8, pp. 109–110
- 1912 assignment
- Water tablet; Water of Water
What the Fourth Call describes
The English rendering beginning on printed page 109 places the speaker in the south and asks about thunders of increase governing a second angle. It then piles up numbered groups: thirty-three thunders, a larger company below them, the second beginnings of things, numbers of time, and a final comparison with a first set. The figures are part of this particular Call’s verbal landscape. Universal tables of Enochian correspondences often detach them from the edition and surrounding passage that give them context.
Its ending turns from numerical arrangement to an appeal for the addressed powers to visit the earth and reveal themselves as benevolent messengers. The movement from observation to address makes this Call different from a static diagram of the four Watchtowers. The southern opening and thunder imagery identify “the Fourth Key” without reproducing its ritual text or implying that recitation produces an effect.
Why “south” does not make this the Fire Call
Immediately after the English text, the 1912 Equinox article associates the Fourth Call with the Water tablet and its like-with-like Water angle. The page then passes into a Golden Dawn style opening for an Earth grade before the Fifth Call. Those adjoining directions are part of the twentieth-century printed ritual arrangement. They are not the words of the Fourth Call itself, nor can their placement establish a sixteenth-century instruction from Dee.
The southern viewpoint in the English paragraph belongs to the wording of the Call; Water of Water belongs to the printed attribution. Treating one as a correction of the other would erase the different questions each answers. The sequence in the same edition labels the Third Call Air, the Fourth Water, the Fifth Earth, and the Sixth Fire. Its regular four-tablet order is an editorial map over four highly varied English texts.
Earlier record and edition boundary
The British Library locates the forty-eight Angelical Keys in Dee’s hand at Sloane MS 3191, folios 1r–13r, with reception dates between 13 April and 13 July 1584. That catalogue identifies the autograph series but does not expose a checked, Call-by-Call transcription on the catalogue page. The Fourth Call’s exact letter forms and manuscript punctuation therefore require inspection of the manuscript or a collated edition; the 1912 English paragraph alone cannot prove them.
Casaubon’s 1659 True & Faithful Relation is a later printed witness to Dee’s conferences, available through the Wellcome digitization. It supplies the diary setting for the period in which the Keys were received, but it is not the autograph Keys book. The Fourth Call’s English imagery and Water-tablet assignment appear in the numbered 1912 Equinox printing; the autograph remains the earlier witness to the Keys.
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.