In late 1909, Aleister Crowley traveled into the North African desert with the poet Victor Neuburg to work through the thirty Aethyrs of the Enochian system John Dee and Edward Kelley had recorded in Elizabethan England three centuries earlier. Dee's Aethyrs, concentric spiritual regions named by short strings of Enochian letters running from the outermost, TEX, inward to the innermost, LIL, had been transmitted with Enochian Calls for invoking them but with little description of what a magician would encounter there. Crowley set out to fill that gap experientially, scrying each Aethyr with Neuburg as scribe, moving in reverse order, from the thirtieth Aethyr to the first.
The resulting text, The Vision and the Voice, is Crowley's dictated record of those thirty visions, written as continuous prose describing what he saw and heard rather than as instructions for a reader to follow. It is the direct source for the thirty Enochian Aethyrs already recorded in this atlas: where those entries describe the character and imagery of a given Aethyr, that description traces to this text. The tenth Aethyr, ZAX, is the best known single passage in the work, recounting Crowley's encounter with Choronzon, the entity of dispersion he placed at the threshold of the Abyss, a passage later magicians have returned to more often than any other part of the book.
Crowley considered the working central to his own development as a magician, treating it as the record of his passage through the grades of his own magical system rather than as an academic gloss on Dee's system. That framing shaped how later readers used the text: less as an Enochian reference work in Dee's original sense, and more as an account of one practitioner's inner journey through a structure Dee had left bare.