The Seventh Call moves from the four whole-tablet assignments into the twelve lesser-angle positions of the 1912 scheme. Its English scene is eastern, musical, and centered on mercy.
- Number
- Seventh of the numbered Calls
- 1912 text
- The Equinox I:8, p. 115
- 1912 assignment
- Water of Air
The first of the lesser-angle group
The Seventh Key follows the Sixth immediately on printed page 115. Its English rendering begins in the east, with singing figures amid the flames of an opening glory. These become living dwellings adorned with brightness. The prose moves through strength, towers, seats of mercy, and an appeal to the “servants of mercy” to appear and sing. The images are specific to this Call rather than a generic description of all twelve later subangles.
The English text blends an eastern direction with flames and compassion. No single element word summarizes it faithfully. Its reference to a third and fourth set also looks back into an internally numbered sequence, though a reader should not infer a complete decoding of those relationships from one later rendering. The safe claim is a textual one: page 115 presents this cluster of eastward dwellings, praise, towers, and mercy under the Seventh Key heading.
Water of Air as an editorial placement
The bracket below the 1912 English rendering assigns the Seventh to the Water angle within the Air tablet. It is the first of three remaining subordinate angles of Air in that printed order. The Eighth then moves to Earth of Air and the Ninth to Fire of Air. The Air of Air position had already been paired with the Third Call, so the Seventh begins a new run rather than repeating a whole-tablet attribution.
This assignment is useful for navigating the later ceremonial chart and belongs to that edition. Dee’s manuscript is the older witness for the Keys; a catalogue entry for its folios does not itself contain the Water of Air label. Equating the Call’s eastern scene with “Air” by intuition would also miss the fact that the printed relation has two levels: an Air tablet and a Water subangle within it.
Dee’s manuscript and the 1912 printing
The British Library places the Keys in Sloane MS 3191, folios 1r–13r, and dates their reception from April to July 1584. That is the reliable manuscript locator for the corpus. The Equinox I:8 gives a directly inspectable heading, English rendering, and bracketed Water of Air label for the Seventh on printed page 115. It also places other ceremonial instructions elsewhere in the magazine; those are not parts of Dee’s numbered Call.
Wellcome’s digitization of Casaubon’s 1659 True & Faithful Relation preserves Dee’s conferences as they reached an early printed audience. Casaubon’s book has its own editorial framing and cannot settle letter-by-letter claims about the autograph Keys. The 1912 Equinox printing supplies the Seventh Call’s English imagery and Water of Air assignment; Dee’s manuscript and Casaubon’s edition document earlier stages of the tradition.
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.