The Four Enochian Watchtowers in Dee’s 1584 Record

Four component tables, then one composite

The 1584 account presents four separate tables of letters that can be brought together as a larger arrangement. The usual dimensions, twelve columns by thirteen rows for each Watchtower, give 156 positions per component before the central joining letters are considered. The dimensions establish the format; the surviving witness determines the reading of individual squares.

The record belongs to Dee’s longer sequence of conferences with Kelley, not to a standalone printed manual issued in 1584. The British Library’s Cotton MS Appendix XLVI catalogue establishes the relevant volume and date range. Casaubon’s 1659 print is an edition made more than seventy years after the episode, and its letters can differ from the diary page and from unlabelled online grids.

What “Watchtower” means in this context

In modern Enochian writing a Watchtower is commonly one of the four lettered quadrants. The image invites a directional reading: four areas arranged around a center. Yet “east equals air” and comparable formulas may reflect later editorial or ceremonial decisions. The Equinox I:7 labels its individual plates East, West, North, and South, showing what a reader in 1912 would see. The label establishes the later printed convention; it does not establish every 1584 correspondence by itself.

The fourfold structure also differs from Liber Logaeth’s much larger grids, catalogued as Sloane MS 3189. Even when a reproduced page of letters looks superficially similar, the two objects differ in shelfmark, date, dimensions, and surrounding diary entries.

Why the versions disagree

The 1584 arrangement, 1587 reform, Casaubon’s printed layout, and twentieth-century plates need not give the same position or appearance to a letter. Detaching a small diagram can make its cells look definitive while concealing the version that supplied them. Differences in copying, reform, and printing belong to the table’s history.

Angelic names, sigils, elemental colors, and directional assignments appear in later systems alongside the four quadrants and central cross. The particular text and period determine their meanings.

Worked reading: the “least character” instruction selects paths, not small type

One difficult instruction reported in the 1584 material tells Dee to look into the four parts of the Table and take the letters belonging to the “least character.” Read in isolation, “least” can sound like a direction to choose the smallest written letters. Burns and Moore’s comparison gives it a structural reading: the characters are the governor sigils traced through the squares, and most paths contain seven letters. The number of occupied squares makes the exceptional shorter traces “least”, not the size of a scribe’s handwriting.

Treated as paths rather than type sizes, the 12-by-13 grid becomes a device for tracing governor sigils. A typographic reading scans individual glyphs for capitals, lower-case forms, or visual size. A path reading asks which positions are joined into a governor’s character and then compares the length of those traced figures. The instruction presupposes the earlier governor names and their sigils as well as the later letter field. It is evidence that the four component tables were meant to interact with material delivered before them, rather than to stand as four independent elemental posters.

The surviving record does not resolve every difficulty in the passage. Dee’s relevant writing is partly unclear, and Burns and Moore explicitly present a modern reconstruction of how the short paths work. The secure point is the mismatch between an isolated letter and a character traced across several letters. The specialist interpretation is persuasive because it explains why seven-letter governor paths are the norm and why a small set of shorter paths would be singled out. It remains an argued reading, not a newly discovered instruction written in modern terminology.

The “least character” belongs to the 1584 Great Table; elemental colors belong to the Golden Dawn’s later Watchtowers. Later Golden Dawn plates label and color the four quadrants as elemental Watchtowers. The “least character” problem belongs to the internal relationship between the 1584 Great Table and governor sigils; it does not require those later colors. By following one instruction through the structure, the four 12-by-13 grids become a connected selection device. Their function emerges from names and paths, while their later elemental presentation remains a separate historical layer.

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.