The Ninth Call fills the last lesser angle of Air in the 1912 table, but its English scene is dominated by armed fire, the western horizon, judgment, and an abrupt request for comfort.
- Number
- Ninth of the numbered Calls
- 1912 text
- The Equinox I:8, pp. 116–117
- 1912 assignment
- Fire of Air
A guard of fire at the western edge
The printed English Ninth Key begins with a powerful fiery guard and two-edged swords. They stand in the west, a direction that cannot be turned into the Call’s elemental assignment merely by reading a compass diagram. The account then gives them vials of wrath, wings likened to wormwood and salt, and a very large measured company of ministers. These details create a threatening collective portrait rather than a generic invocation of “air.”
The middle of the passage makes the guard even less abstract. It places moss, treasure, millstones, blood, diamonds, and marble around these figures. The rapid change of materials is part of the English rendering’s unsettling texture. At the end, however, the voice asks that the vials be withheld because the moment calls for comfort. An entry that reports only swords and wrath misses that final reversal. The page is a reading of a historical text, not a prediction of violence or a claim that words produce a result.
Why the printed label says Fire of Air
The Equinox places the Ninth at the Fire angle of the Air tablet. In the same printed scheme, the Third had occupied Air of Air, the Seventh Water of Air, and the Eighth Earth of Air. This makes the Ninth the fourth position in the Air tablet’s complete set, despite being the third Call in the later run from seven onward. The two-part relation is important: Fire names a subordinate angle, while Air names its parent tablet.
The fiery guard might seem to confirm that assignment intuitively, but its textual setting also includes a westward position and images of blood, stone, and moss. The source of the exact Fire of Air label is the bracketed apparatus following the English Call, not an inferred elemental essence. The table helps a modern reader navigate the 1912 ceremonial layout while the passage itself remains more varied than that label.
A page locator rather than a guessed folio
The Ninth Angelical wording begins on printed page 116 of The Equinox, volume I, number 8; its English rendering and Fire of Air bracket are on page 117. The Ninth follows the Eighth’s English ending and precedes the Tenth’s opening across this spread. The heading, English paragraph, and assignment are checkable in the original issue scan. The page does not claim that the Equinox editor reproduced every mark of an autograph folio without variation.
The British Library identifies the earlier corpus of forty-eight Angelical Keys in Sloane MS 3191 at folios 1r–13r, received across April to July 1584. Its catalogue does not give the Ninth Call an individual date or folio. A precise claim about Dee’s spelling would need inspection of the manuscript or a scholarly collation. The Ninth’s English imagery and Fire of Air assignment appear in the 1912 printing; the manuscript catalogue establishes the earlier witness for the corpus.
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.