Liber Loagaeth, the Angelical Calls, and the Aethyrs: What Connects Them?

1583 book, 1584 Keys, 1585 earthly knowledge

The British Library dates Kelley’s Loagaeth transcription to 1583. Its record for Sloane MS 3191 places forty-eight Angelical Keys at folios 1r–13r and dates their reception from 13 April to 13 July 1584 in Kraków. The same later volume has Liber Scientiae in two separated folio ranges, 14r–31r and 52r–80v, with the first part collected in 1585. This is a manuscript chronology, not a proof of any claimed supernatural event. It matters because an instruction printed beside a twentieth-century Watchtower diagram can give the false impression that all elements were copied together from one 1583 square. The wording of the Keys survives in Sloane MS 3191, a different manuscript from the Loagaeth volume.

Why “nineteen” and “forty-eight” Calls coexist

Davila explains the 1584 sequence as eighteen Calls plus a final form with thirty permutations; he also notes an unexpressed first Call in the conceptual count of forty-nine. Thus nineteen verbal patterns can be described alongside forty-eight expressed applications. The catalogue title “forty-eight Angelical Keys” uses a manuscript count. The two ways of counting answer different questions, and neither gives the number of Loagaeth grids. A later reader may propose that a Key “opens” a Loagaeth table, but a proposed one-to-one mapping between every surviving grid face and every Call must be documented, not inferred by noticing that both traditions use the number forty-eight.

Worked comparison: a Loagaeth face becomes an ordered Call

Leaf 2a of the Loagaeth transcription begins “alla opnay qviemmah” and continues as a 49 by 49 field of individual characters without a paired English translation. Whitby reports that the later Claves were obtained from Loagaeth’s tables by angelically supplied grid references: a direction and number of squares selected each next letter. Davila describes the receiving side of that process: the first four 1584 Calls were dictated backward, letter by letter from a table seen in vision, and each was then translated into English; most remaining Calls arrived in normal word order, with translations supplied weeks afterward. The table and Call are therefore related, but they do different jobs. The square stores characters spatially; the extraction instructions impose a route; the resulting Call orders those letters as an utterance; and the English gloss makes that utterance interpretable. Printing the Call beside a grid without its route removes the mechanism that joins them.

The Aethyrs belong to a different list and reading tradition

The thirty named Aethyrs and ninety-one earthly parts are associated with Liber Scientiae and with later summaries, including Crowley’s Liber Chanokh. A name such as TEX or LIL can be put into the repeated Aethyr Call; that does not turn those three-letter names into the contents of Sloane MS 3189’s 49 by 49 squares. Our Aethyr directory keeps the named sequence and its witness separate. Crowley’s order, visualization, and ritual framing document an early twentieth-century reception of Dee’s records. Treating every Enochian diagram as “Liber Loagaeth” erases the manuscript distinctions that make the history intelligible.

The manuscript, scholarly, and occult layers

The two British Library catalogue records separate the dates and folios of the 1583 holy book and the 1584 Calls. Davila describes the chronological shift between them without collating every grid. Peterson’s transcription is a modern editorial representation of Loagaeth rather than a manuscript facsimile. The Aethyrs have their own manuscript setting and 1912 printed reception, while Crowley’s Liber Chanokh presents a distinct twentieth-century layer. A single mystical “system” diagram can hide these differences when a letter, count, or attribution is disputed.

Sources and witness notes

1. British Library, Sloane MS 3189 catalogue ↗Shelfmark, folios, Kelley attribution, physical description, provenance, and current image availability.
2. British Library, Sloane MS 3191 catalogue ↗The 1584 Keys and later Liber Scientiae material in a separate manuscript.
3. James R. Davila, “The Ninety-Four Books of Ezra and the Angelic Revelations of John Dee” (2018) ↗Academic chronology and separate discussion of the holy book and subsequent Calls.
4. Christopher L. Whitby, John Dee’s Actions with Spirits (PhD thesis, 1982) ↗Scholarly manuscript study and transcription of Sloane MS 3188, with a material inventory and analysis of Loagaeth and the later Keys.
5. Joseph H. Peterson, edited transcription of Liber Loagaeth ↗A modern editorial transcription with an introduction explaining textual and numbering problems; editorial work remains copyrighted.
6. Aleister Crowley, Liber Chanokh ↗Twentieth-century reception, not a sixteenth-century manuscript witness.