The operative Western tradition

This section covers the practical, operative side of Western esotericism: the planetary spirits, intelligences and magic squares of Renaissance magic, the four elementals, and the thirty Aethyrs and ninety-one governors of the Enochian system received by John Dee and Edward Kelley in the 1580s.

Where much of the atlas is concerned with belief and cosmology, this material is concerned with technique, the timing, tools and procedures by which practitioners sought to act on the world or on themselves through contact with the beings and forces the cosmology described.