What the Golden Dawn Made of It

Almost everyone who works with Enochian material today received it through the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn rather than from Dee, and the order did not simply pass it on. Its teaching papers on the subject placed the Tablet of Union at the centre of the scheme, assigned it to spirit or aether as a fifth element above the four, arranged the four great tables on the walls of its ritual chamber with the tablet between them, and attached the whole to the order's own system of correspondences, its grades, its tattva symbols and its colour scales. Aleister Crowley inherited that arrangement and carried it into his own work, from which most twentieth century practice descends.

The order also worked from a rearranged version of Dee's great table, revised on the authority of a vision rather than of the manuscripts. When the Dee manuscripts became widely available in the later twentieth century, practitioners could compare the two for the first time, and the difference between what Dee recorded and what the Golden Dawn taught became a live argument within the field, with some working from the manuscripts and others holding that a century of practice with the revised arrangement counts for something.

The atlas holds the document and its reception apart. The manuscript exists; what is made of it is a separate question with its own history.