Tabula Recensa: The 1587 Reformed Enochian Great Table

Why a second table matters

The record does not leave a single unchanging Great Table for all subsequent users. A later alteration is reported during the 1587 conferences. Editors generally call that form the Tabula Recensa. When a modern chart uses the words “original Enochian tablet” without identifying its recension, a reader cannot tell whether a differing letter is a deliberate 1587 variant, a printer’s error, or a new editor’s reconstruction.

The British Library catalogues Cotton MS Appendix XLVI across 1583–1587. That broad date range places both episodes in the diary corpus, though the catalogue is not itself a critical edition of every grid. Casaubon printed the conference material in 1659; his publication preserves crucial evidence but brings the usual demands of comparing a print with the autograph. Burns and Moore’s comparative discussion is useful precisely because it identifies the two phases rather than treating variation as noise.

Mixed cells create a new table

A derived name can be built by reading selected squares. If one copied square comes from the 1584 table and another from the 1587 table, the resulting string may belong to neither witness. Transcriptions differ according to the table, row and column scheme, treatment of uncertain marks, and use of Roman or drawn Angelical letter forms.

The manuscript, the 1659 print, and twentieth-century plates preserve different letter readings. A grid copied from either later form is not an exact transcription of the 1587 manuscript.

How the reform reached later readers

A person looking at Casaubon’s seventeenth-century volume encountered Dee’s material through printed typography and an editor’s ordering. A person studying the 1912 Equinox plates met it through a different occult publishing project. The latter belongs to the history of Golden Dawn and Crowley reception, regardless of which older variant its artist preferred. Each witness can answer a question about its own era.

The Cotton diary episodes, Casaubon page, and Equinox plate are distinct dated stages in the table’s transmission. Cell-by-cell differences can therefore be historical variants or transcription slips even when the overall shape remains the same.

Worked comparison: GAIOL moves with its quadrant in Sloane MS 3191

Sloane MS 3191 preserves a sequence of drawings in which the four lettered quadrants are not always in the same places. One quadrant can be tracked by the three names through its central line: MPH, ARSL, GAIOL, with GAICH also present as a letter alternative. In the first lettered arrangement described by Burns and Moore, that quadrant sits at upper right. In a following diagram of governor sigils, the same quadrant’s sigil group is placed at lower right and numbered second. The name sequence gives the moving block an identity.

This is more informative than saying that the Reformed Table “reorders the elements.” The drawings do not begin with modern Water and West labels as their primary evidence. They preserve a block of letters, its central names, and associated sigils, then experiment with where that block belongs relative to the other three. ORO IBAH AOZPI remains first; MPH ARSL GAIOL remains second in the numbered sequence even when its physical corner changes. Sequence and position are distinct variables.

A later lettered drawing matches the spatial relationship of the governor diagram, while a marginal note indicates that the quadrants must be placed in the earlier reformed order. Burns and Moore infer that Dee is showing a reasoning process: one view retains an older spatial relationship, another gives the Recensa order, and the sigils stay with their own letter fields as the blocks move. That is a scholarly interpretation of the drawings, but it accounts for the repeated names and the accompanying corrections better than treating each page as an unrelated table.

The worked comparison explains what “reform” changes. It can reorder whole Watchtowers without dissolving the internal name that identifies each one. It can also preserve alternative letters within a named block, as GAIOL and GAICH demonstrate. A modern chart that silently chooses a corner and a spelling resolves both problems at once, hiding the manuscript’s process. Following GAIOL across the drawings keeps the levels separate: quadrant identity, numbered order, physical placement, and individual cell reading.

Sources

1. British Library, Cotton MS Appendix XLVI catalogue ↗The surviving conference record, dated 1583–1587, containing the 1584 and 1587 episodes.
2. Wellcome Collection, Casaubon, A True and Faithful Relation (1659) ↗Digitised public-domain printed edition; a seventeenth-century edited witness, not the autograph.
3. The Equinox I:7 (1912), original issue scan ↗Printed Plates III–VIII: a general view, four directional Watch-Towers, and the detached Black Cross or Table of Union, all listed facing printed page 234.
4. Burns and Moore, John Dee and Edward Kelley’s Great Table ↗Modern comparative analysis of the 1584 delivery and 1587 changes; used to frame, not replace, primary witnesses.
5. Burns and Moore, Great Table, Part II ↗Discussion of the Black Cross, textual variants, and later attributions.