The Thirteenth Call opens a new tablet grouping in the 1912 sequence. Its very short English rendering addresses swords of the south and places them before a promise and a bitter sting.
- Number
- Thirteenth of the numbered Calls
- 1912 text
- The Equinox I:8, p. 120
- 1912 assignment
- Air of Earth
The compact image of swords with eyes
The English Thirteenth Key addresses swords of the south and attributes forty-two eyes to them. Those eyes are associated with stirring the wrath of sin, while the same address depicts people becoming drunken despite being empty. A promise of God and a power called a bitter sting follow. The passage is far briefer than the long Ninth or Tenth and does not supply an extended landscape; its peculiar combination of swords, eyes, emptiness, and promise carries the identity of this Call.
As in the two preceding short Keys, the conclusion asks the addressed beings to move, appear, and disclose the mysteries of their creation, with the speaker identifying as a servant of God. That shared closing formula should not erase the different opening images. Nor should the word “swords” alone turn this into an instruction for aggression. The page records the vocabulary of a historical English rendering without endorsing a practical use or assigning a promised result to it.
Where the Earth group starts
The Equinox gives the Thirteenth the Air angle of the Earth tablet. Earth of Earth had already been assigned to the Fifth. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth will complete the remaining Water of Earth and Fire of Earth angles. The Thirteenth thus begins the later three-Call supplement to the Earth tablet, just as the Tenth opened the corresponding Water-tablet run. This placement comes from the printed apparatus beneath the English text.
A southern direction is part of the Call’s scene, while Air of Earth is the 1912 classification. The swords and sting might suggest other elements to a modern reader, but none of those impressions changes the two-part printed label. Keeping “of Earth” visible also prevents confusion with the Air tablet, whose four positions were completed by the Third, Seventh, Eighth, and Ninth Calls.
A numbered Key across two pages
The Angelical Thirteenth, its English rendering, and Air of Earth bracket all appear on printed page 120 of the original issue. The short Twelfth closes above it, while the Fourteenth begins on the next page. The shared page makes the heading and attribution inspectable in one view, though a machine-readable extraction could still attach the neighboring short Call’s bracket to the wrong number. The printed headings establish the boundary.
Sloane MS 3191 remains the older manuscript locator for Dee’s forty-eight Angelical Keys, catalogued together at folios 1r–13r and dated across April to July 1584. The public catalogue does not provide a separate Thirteenth-Key folio or day. The 1912 printing is an influential later witness with its own English rendering and elemental assignments; its Earth-tablet label is not an original heading from Dee’s autograph.
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.