An oak in the north becomes the center of the Tenth Call’s printed English scene. Its thunders and repeated cries form a different kind of passage from the Ninth’s armed western guard.
- Number
- Tenth of the numbered Calls
- 1912 text
- The Equinox I:8, pp. 117–118
- 1912 assignment
- Air of Water
An oak whose branches hold lament
The Tenth Key opens with thunders of judgment and wrath in the north. The English rendering gives them the likeness of an oak whose branches contain twenty-two nests of lamentation. Burning, scorpions, sulphur, and poison extend the image. These are not instructions for a calendar, weather event, or natural tree; they are the source’s symbolic description of a menacing northern structure.
The passage then accelerates through enormous numerical measures of roaring, earthquakes, and surges. A rock producing many others is compared with the way a human heart produces thoughts. Repeated cries of woe close the scene before the voice calls for the thunders to depart without their powerful sounds. The combination of a branching tree, sound, geology, and grief makes this Call recognizable beyond the shorthand “Tenth Key.” None of those printed numbers is used here as a practical prescription.
The first lesser angle of Water
After the English rendering, the 1912 edition places the Tenth in the Air angle of the Water tablet. The Fourth Call already carried Water of Water, and the Eleventh and Twelfth supply Earth of Water and Fire of Water. The Tenth therefore opens a three-Call sequence that completes the Water tablet’s other angles. The fact that the Call says “north” does not change its two-level assignment in that later table.
Air of Water names an editorial correspondence, not a direct translation of the oak, scorpion, or thunder images. A reader can use the label to find the Call within the 1912 Equinox article’s four-by-four matrix, then return to the English paragraph without forcing every noun into a single element. Calling this “the Water Call” alone would also hide which subordinate position it occupies and could confuse it with the Fourth’s Water of Water.
The page break and the earlier series
The Tenth’s Angelical paragraph begins on printed page 117 and continues on page 118, where its English rendering and Air of Water attribution appear. A PDF search hit on page 117 therefore captures only part of the Call. The Eleventh begins on page 119 after the Tenth’s attribution and neighboring ceremonial caption. These page boundaries are more reliable for this edition than a guessed date in Dee’s 1584 sequence.
Sloane MS 3191 is the earlier manuscript locator for the forty-eight Keys as a group, not a public line-by-line display of this Tenth Call in the British Library catalogue. The Equinox is a later printed witness that supplies the numbered English imagery and Air of Water assignment, alongside elemental categories and ritual material absent from the catalogue summary.
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.