A line headed “Enochian Call” may be a manuscript reading, an English rendering, a printed revision, or a phonetic teaching version. Each belongs to a different historical layer.
- Autograph Keys
- Sloane MS 3191, 1584
- Early print
- Casaubon, 1659
- Later arrangement
- The Equinox I:8, 1912
The autograph witness and its limits
Sloane MS 3191 contains the Keys in Dee’s hand, according to the British Library catalogue. The record supplies a title, date span, folios, and description of the volume. It does not supply a public diplomatic transcription of every mark through that page. Exact Angelical spellings, punctuation, and layouts therefore depend on an edition or manuscript image rather than on the catalogue description alone.
The same volume holds the later Liber Scientiae and Heptarchia. That proximity is useful context but does not erase section boundaries. A Key, Aethyr table, and Great Table diagram derive from distinct parts of the record; their combination in a modern graphic is not an original page from Dee’s book.
An edition can preserve and reshape
Meric Casaubon’s True & Faithful Relation appeared in 1659. The Folger identifies the printed edition, and Cornell digitizes a copy. It exposed readers to Dee’s recorded conferences through a seventeenth-century editor’s selection and framing. It cannot stand in for every reading of the separate autograph book. The 1912 Equinox article on the forty-eight Calls presents them within a ceremonial program and gives English renderings and tablet assignments.
Each layer answers a different historical question: what survives in Dee’s own hand, what a seventeenth-century print audience encountered, and what a twentieth-century occult author taught. The 1912 editor explicitly notes that manuscript collation still left variant readings and that the surviving language was too limited to resolve all of them on general principles. No single printed transcription settles every variant.
Pronunciation and translation labels
The 1912 Equinox article gives a pronunciation suggestion based on inserting vowels associated with Hebrew letter names. That is evidence for its editor’s phonetic practice, not a recording of how Dee and Kelley spoke in 1584. Similarly, a printed English version is one rendering rather than proof that every Angelical form had a settled one-to-one dictionary meaning. A thematic summary cannot reproduce all differences between the original text and the English beside it.
Ordinal numbers, language, and edition distinguish the surviving versions of a Call. Regularized spelling, pronunciation, and elemental attributions may belong to later editors rather than Dee’s autograph. The 1912 English renderings and assignments preserve those later choices alongside the earlier manuscript record.
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.
- Folger Shakespeare Library, A True & Faithful Relation (1659) ↗Bibliographic record for Meric Casaubon’s later edition of Dee’s conferences.
- Cornell University Library, digitized 1659 True & Faithful Relation ↗Digitized early printed witness; its arrangement is not a substitute for the autograph Keys.
- 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.
- IAPSOP, The Equinox publication record ↗Issue identification and an explicit notice about the modern reconstruction of the scans.
- 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.