The Twelfth Call’s English passage is brief and direct: lanterns of sorrow in the south are summoned with a numbered train, followed by a familiar request to appear and reveal.
- Number
- Twelfth of the numbered Calls
- 1912 text
- The Equinox I:8, pp. 119–120
- 1912 assignment
- Fire of Water
Twenty-eight lanterns, then an appeal
The printed Twelfth Key addresses figures ranging in the south and likens them to twenty-eight lanterns of sorrow. It calls for them to gather and bring a train numbered 3,663, then links the scene to magnifying a divine lord whose name among the addressees is wrath. This concentrated imagery differs from the Eleventh’s narrative of an eagle and a house of death. Its two numbers are textual details in the 1912 English rendering, not dates, calculations, or recommended ritual counts.
The rest of the short paragraph asks the figures to move, appear, uncover the mysteries of their creation, and show friendliness to the speaker as God’s servant. Similar closing language appears in nearby Keys, so the distinct search anchor is the southern lantern image and accompanying train. The historical voice speaks in the imperative, but our description remains an account of what the source prints rather than advice to address any beings or a statement that doing so produces an effect.
Fire within the Water tablet
The 1912 Equinox article places the Twelfth at Fire of Water. The Fourth had Water of Water, the Tenth Air of Water, and the Eleventh Earth of Water; the Twelfth closes that Water-tablet group in the 1912 four-by-four scheme. Its southern setting and wrath imagery may make the Fire word seem intuitive, but the parent Water tablet remains part of the full attribution. Dropping it would give a different, incomplete label.
These correspondences are a later printed arrangement of the numbered Keys. The bracket beneath this English text is the evidence for Fire of Water. A catalogue record for Dee’s autograph corpus supplies an earlier physical witness but does not print this twentieth-century ceremonial table. Elemental claims may therefore belong to a dated source, a modern inference about imagery, or a ritual system with its own conventions.
A short Key on a crowded printed page
The Angelical Twelfth begins on printed page 119 of The Equinox I:8, after the Eleventh’s Earth of Water note. Its English rendering and Fire of Water bracket begin page 120 before the Thirteenth. Its brevity makes it especially easy for an extracted text to lose the boundary and attach a neighboring elemental caption. The printed heading and the bracket after the English paragraph mark the Twelfth’s bounds.
The British Library locates the original Keys as a whole in Sloane MS 3191, folios 1r–13r, with a reception span in 1584. The catalogue does not provide a per-Key folio or date for the Twelfth. Exact Angelical spelling claims need a checked manuscript or collation. The lantern and number details and Fire of Water label appear in the 1912 printing; the manuscript record supplies the earlier history of the series.
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.