The Second Call begins as a question about voices and winds. Its printed English then shapes fire, a wedding chamber, stone, and a building into a portrait of power and perception.
- Number
- Second of eighteen fixed forms
- 1912 text
- The Equinox I:8, pp. 104–105
- 1912 assignment
- Four Spirit roots in the Tablet of Spirit
A question, then a building
The 1912 English Second Key opens by asking whether winds can comprehend the addressees’ voices. Fire frames them, but the following images move beyond flame: vessels for a wedding, flowers in a chamber, feet stronger than barren stone, and a structure conceived in the divine mind. The label “wind text” misses the Call’s succession of sound, formation, strength, and imagined structure. Its ending seeks a seer’s enlarged capacity to perceive.
The repeated contrasts are distinctive. Multiplying winds make the addressees’ voices seem mighty, while a barren stone tests the force of their feet. The wedding image suggests preparation and fitting, not a claim that the Call concerns human marriage. The building is presented as exceptional because of where it is conceived. These are observations about the 1912 rendering; the page does not establish a modern psychological outcome or a settled dictionary meaning for each Angelical word.
Four roots are a printed attribution
The Second Key’s Angelical and English texts are on printed page 104, with the English conclusion and bracketed assignment continuing on page 105. The bracket names four Spirit roots associated with Air, Water, Earth, and Fire in the Tablet of Spirit, and also associates them with four Aces. Those details explain why later diagrams often place the Second Call above four elemental branches. The assignment is directly visible in the 1912 issue.
That bracket is not the same evidence as the British Library’s description of Sloane MS 3191. The catalogue identifies a book of forty-eight Keys in Dee’s hand, with dates and folios for the collection, but does not present the 1912 four-root table as a manuscript label. A reader can therefore say that the Second Call belongs to Dee’s recorded Keys and that a later printed system assigned it to the four roots. Combining the two into one unqualified historical claim would obscure how the system developed.
Reading it beside the First and Third
The Second’s introductory question differs from the commanding divine voice of the First. Its close also differs from the Third’s twelve kingdoms and numbered ages. The three texts occupy adjacent positions in the numbered series, yet the imagery is not a repetitive substitution exercise. The 1912 article inserts ceremonies between them, so a reader following page order should distinguish each Key’s Angelical paragraph and English rendering from the surrounding performance directions.
The British Library record supplies the earlier physical locator, while the 1912 issue supplies the particular English motifs and Spirit-root labels summarized here. The issue editor warns near the First Key that manuscript collation left variant readings. That warning applies to confident claims about the printed spellings elsewhere in the run. For close philology one needs a checked manuscript or critical edition; for the Second Call’s visible 1912 arrangement, printed pages 104–105 are the relevant starting point.
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.