The Sixteenth Call begins the later Fire-tablet subangle run. Its second flame is pictured as a house of justice that moves over the earth and distinguishes creatures.
- Number
- Sixteenth of the numbered Calls
- 1912 text
- The Equinox I:8, pp. 122–123
- 1912 assignment
- Air of Fire
A second flame with a house of justice
The 1912 English Sixteenth addresses a second flame rather than the Fifteenth’s first. It calls this figure a house of justice, gives it a beginning in glory, and says it will comfort the just. The passage also imagines it walking on 8,763 feet over the earth, able to understand and separate creatures. A final title joins extension with conquest. These images are unlike the preceding Call’s wings, dryness, and seal of honor.
The large number belongs to the printed scene, not a measurement to verify in the natural world or a count for practice. The move from comforting the just to separating creatures also resists flattening the text into a purely soothing or purely violent slogan. Its English voice invokes and requests disclosure in the same formula used nearby; the distinct center of this Call is the justice house and many-footed movement. The article records those textual features without promising a result from recitation.
A new tablet row in the 1912 system
Below the English conclusion, The Equinox places the Sixteenth at Air of Fire. The Sixth had Fire of Fire; the Seventeenth and Eighteenth will fill Water of Fire and Earth of Fire. This is the final parent tablet in the later sixteen-position matrix. Although the English paragraph names a flame, the full attribution is not simply “Fire.” The Air component is a subordinate angle, and the Fire component is its parent tablet.
The ceremonial title printed after the bracket assigns a princely position in a chariot of fire. That title belongs to the later editor’s apparatus. The English rendering itself does not provide a prose explanation of why a many-footed house of justice maps to Air. Its placement is established by the bracket and by sequence. Separating the location in a printed table from the images of the Call keeps the historical claim narrow and checkable.
An English text across a page break
Printed page 122 carries the Sixteenth’s Angelical wording and the start of its English rendering. The English conclusion and Air of Fire bracket continue onto page 123. The page break is easy to miss in a machine-readable extraction, particularly because the Seventeenth begins below the Sixteenth’s apparatus on 123. Both printed pages belong to the Sixteenth’s presentation in the original issue.
The British Library’s Sloane MS 3191 record locates the autograph Keys together at folios 1r–13r and supplies the 1584 reception range, but not a public Sixteenth-Key day or folio. That limitation matters when an online list gives a precise manuscript claim for every number. This article attributes the justice and feet details to the 1912 English witness and the Air of Fire relation to its bracket; it uses the manuscript catalogue only for the earlier 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.